vodmatic puts films and series from your own media server into your Ministra portal, and keeps doing it as new files arrive. You point it at the folders your media lives in, tell it how a playable address is built, and it does the rest: reads the filenames, looks up artwork and descriptions, and writes the entries into Ministra's database.
What you were given
Your instance is a private web panel at an address of the form https://yourid.vodmatic.livlost.net. It is yours alone. Sign in with the username and password you chose during setup.
There is no software to install on your own machines. vodmatic runs on our server and reaches your media server the same way you would — over SSH, SFTP, FTP or plain HTTP — using credentials you enter once in the panel.
What it writes, and what it never touches
vodmatic writes to your Ministra database: video entries, seasons, episodes, file rows, categories and artwork. That is the whole of it.
It never moves, renames, re-encodes or deletes a single one of your media files. It only reads them, and mostly it only reads their names. If vodmatic were switched off tomorrow, every file would be exactly where you left it.
It does not delete anything from Ministra either. Where something has to be taken out of service, it is unpublished — a flag is cleared, the entry and its artwork stay — and every such change is written down and can be undone.
The screens, in the order you will meet them
| Status | Is this instance all right, and if not, what is wrong. |
| Library | Your folders, your media server connections, and what has been found in them. |
| Needs attention | The questions vodmatic will not guess the answer to. |
| Activity | Every file it has looked at, with the reasoning and the actual SQL. |
| Matches | Titles it could not find at the metadata provider, for you to pin by hand. |
| Categories | Which portal category each of your folders maps to. |
| Missing files | Portal entries whose playback file is no longer on the media server. |
| Duplicates | The same programme sitting in your catalogue more than once. |
| Statistics | What has been added, and when. |
| Licence | Your licence status and how much of your plan you are using. |
| Settings | The Ministra connection, parsing rules, and the dry-run switch. |
The first hour
- Finish the setup wizard. It walks you through the Ministra connection, your media server, your folders and the playback address. Nothing is written to Ministra until it is done.
- Leave dry run on for the first pass. vodmatic will work out everything it would do and show it to you without writing a thing.
- Read the Activity screen. Every decision is there with its reasoning.
- When the plan looks right, switch writing on. Everything the dry run only reported is queued and goes in.
How fast it works
A background worker runs every minute and processes a batch of files. A first import of a large library takes hours rather than minutes — deliberately, so that a mistake in your settings does not fill your catalogue with forty thousand wrong entries before you notice. After that, new files are usually in the portal within a minute or two of being found.
If something looks wrong
Start at Status. It ranks what is wrong, in sentences, and links to the screen that shows it. Nearly everything in this knowledgebase is reachable from a line on that screen.
